[HN Gopher] Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (...
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Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
Author : lopespm
Score : 76 points
Date : 2024-10-01 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (howtomarketagame.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (howtomarketagame.com)
| amelius wrote:
| We all built our castle in TSMC's and ASML's kingdom ...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| While being guarded by a moat of snakes..
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Interesting article but it only talks about 1 half of the coin.
| For the sort of stuff they are talking about you can't get near
| the visibility and ease of use building it yourself.
|
| You will see a fraction of the traffic that somebody doing the
| same thing on those platforms will see.
|
| They try to hand wave it with build a tower and bring them back
| to your site but that rarely works well.
|
| I need to create an account to use your site has a significantly
| higher bar than I hit subscribe to see your next video in my
| feed.
| Apreche wrote:
| I have friends dealing with this very problem. They strongly
| believe in and agree that they should build in their own
| kingdom. They hate the platforms and all the ways in which they
| are bad.
|
| But they are small business owners. They make their living
| entirely based on digital visibility. They need to get their
| message out to where the eyeballs are. They may try to get
| people to subscribed directly to their e-mail newsletter, but
| that's not enough. Most people find them on Instagram, Twitter,
| etc. If they delete those accounts, as they would like to,
| their business will be in deep trouble almost immediately.
|
| Web discoverability has had the same dilemma since its
| inception. People only remember and actively engage with a few
| things. A search engine, some media platforms, some communities
| they are involved in, etc. If a link appears in one of those
| places it's extremely visible. If a web page does not show up
| in one of those places, discovering it is next to impossible.
| What are they going to do, guess the URL?
|
| How can someone get some amount of visibility on the web
| without putting anything in anyone else's kingdom? Even someone
| following the POSSE model (post on own site, syndicate
| elsewhere) is extremely dependent on the elsewhere if they want
| to be visibility. Without the elsewheres to syndicate to, they
| will build an empty and isolated kingdom.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Build your castle in the kingdom that gives you the best
| game-theoretic outcome, but always keep in mind that it's not
| _your_ kingdom.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Advertising on multiple platforms is a little less risky than
| building the entire business on, being able to publish to the
| App Store.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Build your castle in your own kingdom but have "vassels" in all
| those other kingdoms to get the benefits they provide and use
| them to promote your own kingdom. You might still rely on those
| 3rd party "kingdoms" for the vast majority of your income but
| you at least have options if one kicks you out and your fans
| know where to find you.
|
| [edit: akin to a developer having the official git repo self
| hosted but mirroring it into github for the community]
| shadowtree wrote:
| MrBeast built his castle inside of Youtube.
| binary132 wrote:
| The thing with being MrBeast is that now he makes YouTube a lot
| of money, so they have a good reason to keep him around.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I've had this attitude before and missed out on some major
| opportunities. For example, even though I was an early smartphone
| adopter, I refused to develop apps for the iPhone when the
| AppStore was launched in 2008 because of the closed nature of
| Apple's ecosystem. There are a variety of billion dollar
| companies which can attest that building their castle in Apple's
| kingdom worked out fine for them.
|
| The big question today is: Do you try to make an AI business
| using OpenAI's APIs, or do you host everything yourself? One
| could make the argument either way.
| keyle wrote:
| This is a good counterpoint. I fell for this too.
|
| There is an argument for airbnb the lands with a castle on
| wheels.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion from 2021:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662
| philipov wrote:
| Problem is that everywhere is already someone else's kingdom.
| This advice amounts to "Don't bother trying to build a castle."
| humblepi wrote:
| Desktop computers still exist and will happily run games.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Piracy and DRM killed most direct-to-customer distribution of
| software.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Valve Software got $8.6B in 2023.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Find the kingdom where you have most friends.
| theossuary wrote:
| It's true, even assuming you do everything yourself, you're
| still building within the laws of a country, which is building
| within someone else's kingdom, as it were. I suppose the real
| rule of thumb should be "Don't build your castle in an
| autocracy."
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I
| can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this.
| Building momentum on twitch is _hard_ , and usually involves a
| ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations,
| until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you
| get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's
| either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of
| some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names
| attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow.
|
| Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems
| like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle
| to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big
| creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones?
| They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming
| categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive
| to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations
| anyway.
|
| Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome
| to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points
| or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I
| don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all
| anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to
| want to spend it on _something_ and I only have enough energy and
| bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb
| and people tire quickly of anyway.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm about to launch an small indie Web site, and yesterday I
| started going through a list of 11 social media sites on which to
| grab the brand name.
|
| But initially the Web site has only an email list signup form.
|
| I figure, if I have an array of icons for social media sites
| where everyone is owned, then random people interested in the
| site will just pick one of those.
|
| I guess I'll soon see whether I get many connections that way,
| whether people actually read their email, whether they forget
| they signed up and flag it as spam (scrodding me with GMail),
| etc.
|
| (Later, I plan to have an active Fediverse presence, for people
| who want _some_ social thing like that. But I don 't expect many
| people to be on Fediverse, so first I'll have to sell it to
| people. It's an easier sell if that's the only "app" on which I'm
| putting out stuff, rather than hypocritically supporting all the
| social media ranching companies by replicating content to them.)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The term is "sharecropping".
| echoangle wrote:
| Easier said than done... if you are a YouTube creator, are you
| supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how
| many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there?
| This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn't
| really actionable for other content.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Well there is podcasting and PeerTube.
| whatshisface wrote:
| YouTube offers millions of dollars in free advertising to
| content creators along with tens of dollars in free hosting.
| giantrobot wrote:
| With YouTube people can just click the "make money" button.
| YouTube handles the ad sales and payments. Both are _your_
| job if you 're podcasting or publishing on PeerTube.
|
| Hosting video content is not an unsolvable problem. YouTube's
| moat is economies of scale and user base. YouTube's draw is
| the "make money" button.
| tshaddox wrote:
| With podcasting you'll almost certainly be reliant on being
| searchable on the major podcasting apps.
|
| PeerTube is as close to nonexistent as a video platform can
| be.
| miki123211 wrote:
| You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom.
|
| If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social
| media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar,
| registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting
| provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be
| able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably
| also your payments provider.
|
| Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and
| it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody
| else's kingdom.
|
| This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would
| have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and
| there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
| lolinder wrote:
| When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really
| starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there:
| identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and
| ensure there's a plan B.
|
| Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If
| you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't
| doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not
| going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift
| that's earthshattering for ~everyone.
|
| On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking
| you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent
| people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it
| actually does happen to people and businesses all the time.
| Even the most law-abiding business should not build their
| castle in a social media platform.
| SigmundA wrote:
| At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a
| standing arming with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign,
| everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are
| social contracts.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Having your own nuclear weapons is probably like having
| firearms in your home in that you're actually _more_ likely
| to be the victim of that class of weapons.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yeah, build a business on an island.
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